Peer-to-peer networks are computer networks that rely on the distributed bandwidth of participant clients, referred to as “peers,” for transmitting data. For instance, peer-to-peer networks are used for sharing data and for streaming media data. Media streaming to a large audience may be achieved by using a peer-to-peer network, where peers act both as receivers and as relays for the stream. Peer-to-peer networks provide the benefit of distributing the throughput over a large number of peer devices.
No video communication tool today is flexible enough to support a panel discussion between several distributed speakers addressing a distributed audience, over a network such as the Internet, at a low cost.
Additionally, such a system should maintain very low latency communication between the different speakers to enable them to converse naturally, and present the audience with a synchronized multiplexed stream at a high enough quality to create a good viewing experience. Existing systems rely on costly and cumbersome dedicated infrastructure to create this viewing experience. Typically, speakers would be located in dedicated rooms, a centralized location would multiplex the different streams, and/or servers would provide the multicast to remote viewers.
Two types of conventional systems include video web-conferencing and video multicasting. In some conventional video web-conferencing systems, a two-way video session can be opened between two clients offering low delay communication. Although some of these conventional solutions use a peer-to-peer network to communicate video when two clients only are running, such conventional solutions cannot utilize a peer-to-peer network when the number of users increases beyond two. In the area of business video web-conferencing, several systems provide customers with the ability to participate in remote multi-way web-conferencing. These systems, however, rely on a dedicated infrastructure and their architecture is different (either server-driven star-shaped distribution or point-to-point architecture).
Regarding video multicasting, in the last two decades much work has considered media delivery from a single server or from a set of servers to a set of clients. One-to-many commercial streaming solutions are offered via content delivery networks (CDNs). Such approaches are based on an overlay of replication or minor servers, to which users are redirected when the maximum number of streams of an individual media server (typically between a few hundred and a few thousand) is exceeded. CDNs are star-shaped distribution systems which relay a one-way stream to an audience of viewers and such architectures differ significantly from peer-to-peer architectures.
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